Local robotics teams take on the world

Three youth robotics teams are in Detroit this week to compete in the FIRST Championships, representing the Kingston area, the province and Canada.

Each year, FIRST youth robotic teams around the world are given a specific challenge or mission with the goal of promoting and inspiring the teams and its members in engineering, science and becoming well-rounded leaders of tomorrow.

From Kingston, the younger Comet Warriors (Team 1948), which is in the FIRST Lego League (FLL), and the high school-level Lake Effect Robotics (Team 2708) and W.A.F.F.L.E.S. (Team 4476), who are in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), have all successfully competed at their district events to move onto the worlds.

Along with learning how to design, build, engineer, problem-solve and code robots made of Lego or metal and gears, the goal of FIRST organization looks to instil teamwork, scientific inquiry and important life skills.

For the Comet Warriors, a team of nine youth, this year has been a whirlwind of discovery and learning.

“It’s a lot different [now] than [it was] at the beginning of the year, because it’s more stressful now,” Macy Preston, an 11-year-old Comet Warriors member, said. “We know a lot more now.”

“It feels like it went by so fast, but when you think of the start of the year and how much we’ve accomplished since then, it feels like a long time,” Lily Goss, 13, added.

For 11-year-old team member Alyssa Whalen, she’s thrilled to see the “random ideas” from the beginning of the season and how they’ve grown into an actual product.

The Lego League level of competition includes three different parts.

“The first [part] is core values, which is arguably the most important and is basically team work and team building,” Preston said. “Some of the core values are ‘We are a team,’ ‘We have fun,’ ‘We learn from our coaches and mentors,’ and ‘We show gracious professionalism in all that we do.’

“The second one is the robot,” she explained. “So we get a mission table and we have to program our robot and build attachments for it to complete different missions to get points in two and a half minutes.”

The teams have to design, build and program their robots, all with Lego pieces.

The third section is a research project. This year’s project theme was hydrodynamics.

“You do a research project of a problem and combine upcoming technology and existing solutions and make them better,” Preston said.

The Comet Warriors designed a way to avoid wasting water while waiting for the shower to get hot.

“When you wait for your shower to heat up, it wastes 15,000 litres of water [per household, per year],” Goss said. “Plus all the energy you’re wasting while it heats up. It costs a lot of money. So we combined a recirculation pump, a motion sensor, a temperature sensor and tiny programmable computers and machine learning, which learn your showering habits. It will deliver hot water to you, only when you need it.”

They even went as far a building an actual version and got to implement their recirculation system into their coach’s house.

The Lake Effect Robotics team is an amalgamation of the former Kingston Collegiate K-Botics team and the Frontenac Secondary FSS Cyber Falcons school teams.

While having more than 50 members, a smaller contingent of Lake Effect Robotics will be competing in Detroit.

They’re easily identifiable by their knitted grey and purple toques.

Similar to the Lego League, the FIRST Robotics Competition level has core values and builds a robot that completes missions, but theirs is full-size.

They will be competing against and with other teams, so communication and teamwork, along with gracious professionalism, are key when it comes to being successful.

“We spend about a week trying to figure out what do we want our robot to do, what’s the most efficient way for us to do this,” Michelle Pitre, a Lake Effect Robotics team member, said. “It’s really neat to see how different teams go about doing that goal and what they find is important for the different aspects of the challenge given every year.”

“You’re not allowed to work on your robot in-between [challenges],” Kevin Wood, Lake Effect Robotics coach, said. “We have to bag up and seal the robot until the next competition.”

That’s where building a practice robot comes in handy.

The W.A.F.F.L.E.S. Robotics team is a community volunteer organization, and its FIRST Robotics level team is the one going to the world competition.

In their bright yellow shirts and black pants, members of the W.A.F.F.L.E.S. are looking to take their robot, Melia, into world-class competition.

The FIRST Robotics Competition teams will be trying to balance and control three scales with milk crates and get their robot to complete the equivalent of a pull-up.

Lake Effect Robotics has competed against and worked with the W.A.F.F.L.E.S. team in competition at the district level, joining forces to compete their task.

The four-day competition, held at the Cobo Center in Detroit, will have more than 30,000 youth competing on over 1,400 teams from more than 62 countries.

“They can be really similar, but no two robots are going to be the exact same, which is a really interesting thing to see in a big competition like this,” Pitre said.

When asked, most of the team members from both levels said that besides competing, the thing that they’re looking forward to most is meeting other youth, making some new friends and seeing what the other teams did for the challenge.

Each of the Kingston teams has a Twitter account that fans and those interested in what it’s all about can follow: Comet Warriors @ecclegorobotics; Lake Effect at @Team2708; and @WAFFLESRobotics.

FIRST, an international organization to inspire youth in the field of engineering and science, stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.

There are a number of levels in FIRST, with participants ranging from kindergarten to Grade 12 — FIRST Lego League Jr., FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition.

For those interested in watching the teams compete, FIRST Championships has set up a live “Field Streams” for each level that will broadcast from the event daily, from Wednesday to Saturday. To watch, go online to www.firstchampionship.org/watch-live.